The Minister of Deregulation Federico Sturzenegger defended the need to advance in a deep labor reform and described the diagnosis of the labor market as “devastating”.
“Argentina has not created formal employment for 10 years, half of our workforce is informal. The debate ended: “We have to formalize people so that they have their retirement and social work protection.”he stated.
As he explained, the initiative seeks to “improve the situation” of workers and confront a structural problem that has been going on for years. “All the trial industrybites (a part of the salary). Unionism bites because they take percentages. “The business chambers bite,” he said this Thursday in an interview with Radio Mitre.
And he added: “If you take the large unions, they bite a million pesos from each worker per year. It is pure toll. If we removed that toll, we would return 100 luquitas to the worker (sic) per month. It is an issue to put on the table.”
Sturzenegger also pointed out that “the employment relationship is a relationship heavily taxed“, which discourages formal hiring. “When you want to hire someone, you have to pay a lot of taxes,” he said, and questioned the “ultraactivity” of collective agreements: “We have agreements from the 70s with obligations at that time, but the structure was never changed. We want to give more freedom, we have to review it.”
Regarding the salary negotiation model, he considered that the current scheme “does not reflect the productive differences between regions“He explained that “in Australia and the United States they are by company, in Germany by regions, and in Argentina and Italy they are by sector and impact the entire country.”
In that comparison, he pointed out: “There the unions come to an agreement with Toyota in Campana, which is a hyper-productive company, and they impose that salary on a producer in Tartagal, Salta, who can’t pay those conditionsAccording to his calculations, “if this unity in salary could be broken, in the northwest employment would increase by 16%”.
The official also defended the direction that the Government adopted in tax terms, by highlighting the tax reduction. “The Government lowered taxes by 5% of GDP and it did so because it lowered spending. Everything you lower in spending is one less tax to collect. It is to give money back to the people,” he stated.